The comedic and ironic misadventures of a confused Philosophy professor on the path to spiritual awakening.

The comedic and ironic misadventures of a confused Philosophy professor on the path to spiritual awakening.

Taha Hussein (1889-1973), blind from early childhood, rose from humble beginnings to pursue a distinguished career in Egyptian public life (he was at one time Minister of Education). But he was most influential through his voluminous, varied, and controversial writings. He became known by the unofficial title 'Dean of Arabic Letters,' and the distinguished Egyptian critic Louis Awad described him as "the greatest single intellectual and cultural influence on the literature of his period." Based on the true story of a friend of the author, this novel-unfolding between Cairo and Paris and through vivid personal correspondence-draws a picture of a powerful friendship and of a young man's dilemma: the man of letters of the title finds himself split between-and in love with-two cultures essentially incompatible, East and West. In his desperate struggle to reconcile them his soul is estranged and he is thrown-or escapes-deeper into the backstreet abyss of First World War Paris. In the end it is perhaps the very impracticality of his own morality that destroys him.

Humans may have reached the top of the food chain, but the world is still teeming with apex predators who retain the advantage in their own environments, and sometimes venture into ours, especially when they have gained a taste for human blood. Survivors, hunters, and witnesses recall first-hand accounts of hair-raising, fatal encounters with massive and dangerous beasts of the wild, describing the often rapid and unstoppable series of events that result in devastation and serve to bolster the legends of the world’s flesh-hungry maneaters. Relentless wolves and rogue elephants, swarms of fire ants and vicious sharks, ruthless panthers, grizzly bears, crocodiles, and even human cannibals—all have taken their toll on unsuspecting travelers.

In the early 1820s, in the gloomy aftermath of the 1789 Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, the French Romantic painter Theodore Gericault (1791-1824) made five portraits of patients in an asylum or clinic. No depictions of madness before or since can compare with them for humanity, straightforwardness and immediacy. The portraits challenge us to find responses in ourselves to the face and the embodied mysteries of the other person, and to our own internal (unsconscious, disavowed) otherness: in this sense, Gericault was a "painter-analyst". The challenge could not be more urgent, in our world of suspicion of the stranger, and of the medicalisation of madness. The book sketches the history of this last process, from the Enlightenment through to the Revolution and its public health policies, to the birth of the asylum in its interface with the penal system. But there was also a new medico-philosophical conviction that the mad were never wholly mad, and their suffering and disturbance might best be addressed through relationship and speech.

From the foreword by Steve Schlissel: "Rushdoony sounds the clarion call of liberty for all who remain oppressed by Christian leaders who wrongfully lord it over the souls of God's righteous ones... I pray that the entire book will not only instruct you in the method and content of a Biblical worldview, but actually bring you further into the glorious freedom of the children of God. Those who walk in wisdom's ways become immune to the politics of guilt and pity." Man has trampled God's law under foot. In doing so, he has misused himself and trampled on the God-given rights of his fellowman. He is conscious of his guilt, and seeks self-justification through self-atonement. The author makes it perfectly clear that there is only one way of escape from present slough and despair. It is in turning in heartfelt repentance to God who has already provided atonement in the sacrifice of His Son. And true repentance includes a return to the doing of God's will as revealed in God's Word, the Bible.